You told us: Most of you don't care that the Pixel 8 lacks ray tracing

The Google Pixel 8 series has arrived, and we recently discovered that the phones lacked hardware-accelerated ray-tracing. This discovery came after our earlier leak pointed to ray-tracing support.

That got us wondering whether readers actually cared about this missing feature. We posted a poll to find out, and here’s what you told us.

Do you care if the Pixel 8 series lacks ray tracing support?

Results

Just over 1,300 votes were counted, and a resounding 76.56% of respondents said they didn’t care about the Pixel 8 series lacking ray tracing support.

It’s not hard to see why many polled readers don’t care about ray tracing on Google’s newest phones. There are very few games that actually support this feature, to begin with. Smartphone screens are pretty small too, so you might not notice these graphical effects anyway.

Meanwhile, ~12% of respondents said they do care but that it’s “not a big deal.” We can understand this position as there is a lack of supported games right now but rival chipsets all support the feature.

Just 5.84% of polled readers said they “care a lot” about the Pixel 8 phones lacking ray tracing capabilities. We’re guessing these readers want ray-tracing support as it’s the latest flagship trend. It’s also possible that these readers want this tech as a form of future-proofing. Google is promising seven years of system updates, after all, so it’s possible ray tracing could be commonplace on mobile games in the Pixel 8’s lifetime.

Finally, 5.61% of respondents said they weren’t sure if they cared about the Pixel 8 phones missing out on ray tracing support.

Comments

• Kiabeta: Why would I EVER need my phone to have Ray Tracing? Seems completely pointless.
• MJ: When I build my new desktop system next year I will care about ray tracing but not on my phone which just do some casual gaming on.
• Maxis: Are RT processors even useful on Android? The vast majority of Android phones do not support it so very few users will actually use games with RT. Why then would developers spend time and money for something that no one will use? As usual, they will do it for iOS now that the newest Pro iPhones all have RT. For Android it will take a couple more years before it becomes common in games.
• Kent Seaton: When it comes to RT support… when would it be used outside of games? Even then, what games would offer RT support? Are we looking at 1% of 1% of 1% type of supported feature? Maybe in a couple years, but then will AI surpass the usefulness of RT? It seems likely to happen.